I read this book over 2 decades ago but I recall it being a wonderful read full of love and adventure. Isabel of course will always mourn the assassination of her father Salvador Allende by Pinochet's henchmen (and backed by the CIA) and some of this intrigue is woven into the story line. Her writing contains a touch of the magical realism of Marquez but with a very female (and sexually active female at that) perspective. There is also a sub-narrative and perhaps it is fair to call it post-modern in that it varies the narration and even gives some of the ending away as the drama unfolds. I think I need to go back and read this one again.

Perhaps it is merely a reflection of my feebleness as a reader that I assume the basic conceit of any first person novel is for the author to be the narrator, more or less. In my defense, this book is dedicated to Allende's mother. And the story itself is about a girl who loses her mother and loves her mother deeply and has all kinds of wooooonderful adventures, only to discover writing and have even more maaaaaaagical adventures, and become highly successful, and be pursued by a general and also a communist rebel and a successful photographer. Everyone loves her. Something about it rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because I think the narrator is Allende and yet my main problem with the narrator is that she apparently has no flaws. She is never mean to anyone in the book, never angry, and, truth be told, never too interesting. People want a narrator who is riddled with doubt and self-loathing. Someone a little more like you and me. Instead we get heavy handed and self important:

"I just do what I can. Reality is a jumble we can't always measure or decipher, because everything is happening at the same time....I try to open a path through that maze, to put a little order in that chaos, to make life more bearable. When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be."

Barf. I will also say I disliked that the narrator had a quality of simply announcing the events of the book. One day she was just done with loving her communist rebel. Poof. One moment she just decided she was beautiful. Abracadabra. Always with little or no lead-up. I like to move with a narrator, not several steps behind her.

There were still flashes of the mystical storyteller I recall so fondly from House of the Spirits. Maybe I was just younger then. I don't know. All I know is I'm glad I checked this book out of the library instead of buying it.

A story about a storyteller stumbled from one bizarre event to others while also telling stories of these eccentric personalities she met, came and went through her life, whom she loved or had loved her and shaped her life. Eva Luna herself, started as a rebellious orphan, full of wonder with fantastic imagination and streak of dramatic insanity that could surprise you when its infrequent but impressive occurrence. Weirdly enough, despite being supposedly such a talented inventor of fantastical stories, writing a telenovela about the story of her life was the big destiny of her existence. That and devoting her entire being waiting for her soulmate, revolving around men and falling in love with them or more like in love with her idealistic fantasy of romantic love and being disillusioned afterward. She ended up as a dull, damsel in distress who was flat, boring, loved by everyone, faultless and flawless. This very disappointing resolution mirrored the book story line, which was very interesting in the beginning with its alluring prose, sometimes beautiful moments, and odd but fascinating happenings, progressed to boring half-cooked political plot about guerrilla war and melodramatic telenovela itself. I lost interest halfway down the book and around last quarter of the book, I just wanted it to be over. It was not that bad, if one was into telenovela stuff, in this case, with stroke of perverse taste and sexual relationship in certain flavours, it just put me off from the already banal tale. The writing style was the saving grace for me, and some of the sideline characters were delightful.

Life is a bit too much of an emotional roller coaster for me to write a proper review of this book at this time, but I will return to write one at some point.

There were some passages that made me feel all the feels, and those I used as status updates throughout the reading of this. Feel free to check those out until whenever I can write a proper review.

Did enjoy it, though. Definitely plan on reading The House of the Spirits soon-ish as well.

Ce naratoare desăvîrșită este Isabel Allende! Romanul Eva Luna, utilizînd o fermecătoare intertextualitate, rescrie mitul Șeherezadei, conversează dezinhibat ba cu Llosa (mai ales cu Mătușa Julia și condeierul) ba cu Marquez (mai ales cu Un veac de singurătate), parodiază romanele picarești, creînd o poveste voit alambicată, mustind de umor și de plăcerea narațiunii.

În plus, lectura Veronicăi Soare se potrivește perfect textului.

*Note: Contains some soft spoilers* (I usually try to avoid any spoilers, but this is how the review came out!)

“I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.”

Eva Luna is a rich and vibrant novel about love, power, and the development of a storyteller. It begins with Eva’s mother Consuelo in an unnamed South American country, her magical life among missionaries and later servant to a professor who had developed a miracle embalming fluid. Eva’s father-to-be is a gardener for the professor who is bitten by a poisonous snake, and Eva is conceived right before his death. She grows up in this strange household scrubbing floors alongside her mother and when her mother dies, though Eva is still quite young, she tends the ailing professor and the one possession she takes with her when he dies is an embalmed Puma.

So, you know, it’s interesting!

The story takes us through Eva’s life, with amazing experiences like being taken in by a young rebel who teaches her how to live on the street and who then settles her into a brothel under the loving care of La Señora.

Meanwhile, a parallel story is told of the young Rolf Carlé, who flees his dangerous household in Europe after experiencing abuse and war trauma. He lands in South America to live with his Aunt and Uncle in La Colonia, a utopian village created to take the best ideas from the settlers’ European homelands.

Eva and Rolf grow up separately to have many experiences with love and danger on their way to taking part in the revolution and also finding their true callings: Eva as a writer and Rolf as a photojournalist. The many supporting characters each have their own developmental storylines, including Eva’s Abuela who sleeps in a coffin and Mimi, the beautiful woman born in a man’s body.

Eva has many transformations of her own, but appropriate to the writer she is, primarily she observes and absorbs her experiences and only toward the end is she able to settle into hard-won happiness transforming them into manuscripts.

“Little by little the past was transformed into the present, the future was also mine; the dead came alive with an illusion of eternity; those who had been separated were reunited, and all that had been lost in oblivion regained precise dimensions.”

While I enjoyed all the color and drama I’ve come to expect from Allende, this one didn’t hold together as well for me as her other novels I’ve read, I think because there is just SO much packed in here. On the other hand, the writing aspect gave it a special meaning to me, and I’m happy to say all of these memorable characters will be hanging around in my mind for a long time.

Maybe not a good Allende to start with, but for fans, a real treat.

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Isabel Allende. Eva Luna was published in 1987 and there is little to suggest that I’d fall under the spell of this novel. I didn’t cotton to South American magical realism by a different author, nor did I want to read a lot of colorful hooptedoodle with no story. But with a command of the page that reminded me of W. Somerset Maugham, Allende has such a strong storytelling impulse and talent for painting with words that I was caught up in the best question a reader can have: “What happens next?”  

The story is the first person account of Eva Luna, beginning at the earliest known record of her mother and proceeding through a life of poverty, servitude, narrow escapes, riches, revolution and love until our narrator meets the man she feels is her mate. Her mother was discovered by Catholic missionaries on the dock of a riverside mission in the jungle of some South American country. The men baptize the child with fiery hair the first female name that comes to mind: “Consuelo.”  

With no recollection of her past, Consuelo invents an origin story involving a Dutch sailor setting her adrift in a rowboat. At the age of 12, she meets a Portuguese man who harvests chickens, spending all day with him romping through the jungle, catching and slaughtering the birds. Alarmed by this development, the missionaries send Consuelo to the city to obtain a proper vocation for a Christian woman. They forbid her from taking her parrot or monkey companions along. 

The journey began by canoe, down tributaries that wound through a landscape to derange the senses, then on muleback over rugged mesas where the cold freezes night thoughts, and finally in a truck, across humid plains through groves of wild bananas and dwarf pineapple and down roads of sand and salt, but none of it surprised the girl, for any person who opens her eyes in the most hallucinatory land on earth loses the ability to be amazed. On that long journey, she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows. Once her tears were exhausted, she closed her lips, resolving from that moment forward to open them only when it could not be avoided. Several days later, when they reached the capital, the priests took the terrified girls to the Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity, where a nun with a jailer’s key opened an iron door and led them to a large shady patio with cloistered corridors on four sides; in the center, doves, thrushes, and hummingbirds were drinking from a fountain of colored tiles. Several young girls in gray uniforms sat in a circle; some were stitching mattresses with curved needles while others wove wicker baskets. 

After three years in the convent, Consuelo shows inclination toward little more than daydreaming. She's placed in the house of a foreign doctor who's developed a highly advanced embalming process for preserving the dead. When their gardener is bitten by a viper, Consuelo deprives her employer of another test subject by saving the Indian's life and hastily conceiving a child with him while he's recovering. A daughter without fangs or scales is born. Consuelo names her Eva ("So she will love life") and without any last name, provides the name of her father's tribe: Luna.

Eva Luna grows up in the house of the professor with little contact with the outside world or other children. On Christmas Eve when she's 6, Eva's mother swallows a chicken bone and dies fearlessly. Eva is raised by her madrina, her godmother, the professor's cook, a devout Catholic from which Eva inherits a defiant independence. As the professor's health fades, she cares for him and upon his death, is named his sole heir, a distinction that doesn't trouble the pastor from claiming all the professor's goods.

At the age of 7, Eva is sent from the place of her birth to earn a living. She befriends a black cook named Elvira but runs afoul with the patrona of her new house, a spinster who does not appreciate Eva's daydreaming. Her cruelty provokes Eva to snatch her employer's wig off her head and flee. She's found in the street by a rascal boy named Huberto Naranjo. He's endeared by Eva's talent for storytelling, but savors his freedom more. Huberto Naranjo convinces Eva to return to her patrona, which she does, for several years at least.

Every time I looked outside from the balcony, I realized that I would have been better off had I not come back. The street was more appealing than the house where life droned by so tediously--daily routines repeated at the same slow pace, days stuck to one another, all the same color, like time in a hospital bed. At night I gazed at the sky and imagined that I could make myself as wispy as smoke and slip between the bars of the locked gate. I pretended that when a moonbeam touched my back I sprouted wings like a bird's, two huge feathered wings for flight. Sometimes I concentrated so hard on the idea that I flew above the rooftops. Don't imagine such foolish things, little bird, only witches and airplanes fly at night. I did not learn anything more of Huberto Naranjo until much later, but I often thought of him, placing his dark face on all my fairy-tale princes. Although I was young, I knew about love intuitively, and wove it into my stories. I dreamed about love, it haunted me. I studied the photographs in the crime reports, trying to guess the dramas of passion and death in those newspaper pages. I was always hanging on adults' words, listening behind the door when the patrona talked on the telephone, pestering Elvira with questions. Run along, little bird, she would say. The radio was my source of inspiration. The one in the kitchen was on from morning till night, our only contact with the outside world, proclaiming the virtues of this land blessed by God with all manner of treasures, from its central position on the globe and the wisdom of its leaders to the swamp of petroleum on which it floated. It was the radio that taught me to sing boleros and other popular songs, to repeat the commercials, and to follow a beginning English class half an hour a day: This pencil is red, is this pencil blue? No, that pencil is not blue, that pencil is red. I knew the time for each program; I imitated the announcers' voices. I followed all the dramas; I suffered indescribable torment with each of those creatures battered by fate, and was always surprised that in the end things worked out so well for the heroine, who for sixty installments had acted like a moron.

This takes us one-fourth of the way through Eva Luna. I was left wanting more. Part of the wonder of this novel is that I can open it to any page and every paragraph is dynamite. Allende doesn't limit her fine writing to the beginning of a chapter. Every page holds a highlight. She not only imagines everything in her world down to the furniture but uses every color and all of her senses to bring that world to life. Characters make discoveries and leave their wisdom behind. In Allende's world, sex is natural, playful and copious.

What did they do when they were alone? Nothing new; they played the same game cousins have played for six thousand years. Things became interesting when they decided to spend nights three in a bed, calmed by Rupert's and Burgel's snoring in the adjacent room. To keep an eye on the girls, the parents slept with their door open, and that also allowed the girls to keep an eye on them. Rolf Carlé was as inexperienced as his two companions, but from the first encounter he took precautions not to get them pregnant, and poured into the erotic games all the enthusiasm and inventiveness he needed to make up for his anatomy ignorance. His energies were endlessly fed by the formidable gifts of his cousins--open, warm, smelling of fruit, breathless with laughter, and exceedingly receptive. Furthermore, having to maintain absolute silence--terrified at the creaking bedsprings, huddled beneath the sheets, enveloped in one another's warmth and aromas--was a spur that set their hearts aflame. They were at the perfect age for inexhaustible lovemaking. The girls were flowering with a summery vitality, the blue of their eyes deepening, their skin becoming more luminous, and their smiles happier; as for Rolf, he forgot his Latin and went around bumping into furniture and falling asleep on his feet; he was only half awake as he waited on the tourists, his legs trembling and his eyes unfocused.

Allende does paint the world as Eva Luna remembers it, but rather than what I think of as "magical realism," this is a world that could exist. Radio soaps and telenovelas pop up throughout the story and some of the descriptions of the little orphan tilt toward the dramatic, but this is the sort of "dramatic" that I enjoy: imaginative, exciting, with bad heroes and good villains and high passions. I couldn't wait to open this book up again to see what Eva Luna was up to. That, in my mind, is what separates this from Hooptedoodle and makes it my favorite read of the year.

Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru to Chilean parents. Her father, a diplomat, deserted them when Isabel was 2. Her mother returned to Santiago, Chile with three children to live with Allende’s maternal grandfather. The financial and social disempowerment of her mother grew a rebellious streak in Allende against patriarchal society. Her mother remarried another diplomat and moving as he changed posts, Allende attended an American private school in Bolivia and an English private school in Beirut, Lebanon. At age 20, she married an engineering student in Chile and had two children.

In 1967, Allende co-founded the feminist magazine Paula and penned a series of satirical columns for it. Her paternal uncle Salvador Allende, elected the first socialist president of Chile in 1970, shot himself three years later during the U.S. backed military coup by Augusto Pinochet. Allende would flee to Venezuela with her two children. During her exile, she wrote a novel, The House of the Spirits, published in 1982 in Argentina and later to international acclaim.  She lives in San Rafael, California with her third husband, an attorney who Allende married when she was 77. 

 

In 2014, Allende was among those awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in the annual White House ceremony. The president said: “When Isabel Allende learned that her grandfather in Chile was dying, she started writing him a letter. Night after night, she returned to it – until, she realized, she was actually writing her first novel. She’s never really stopped. Her novels and memoirs tell of families, magic, romance, oppression, violence, redemption-– all the big stuff.

But in her hands, the big becomes graspable and familiar and human. And exiled from Chile by a military junta, she made the U.S. her home; today, the foundation she created to honor her late daughter helps families worldwide. She begins all her books on January 8th, the day she began that letter to her grandfather years ago. ‘Write to register history,’ she says. ‘Write what should not be forgotten.’” 



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw
-- White Teeth, Zadie Smith

I can’t say this book is among my five favorite from Isabel Allende, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a really good book. It mostly means Allende is an excellent writer, and there are many of her books to make the list.

One of the things I liked most, is the dual narrative. One side telling the story of Eva, the protagonist, conceived when Eva’s mother takes pity on a man who after being bitten by a snake is condemned to death, and Rolf, whose destiny finally brings him to South America where he will, eventually, fall in love with Eva.

An excellent example of the amalgam of mystic and brutality that is Magic Realism, Eva Luna transports us to places and times that exist but never as in the narrative, which fills them with spirits and fairies and the unseen miracles of the everyday.

I found that reading this book was a bit like attending a storytellers' cocktail party, at which the hostess (the author) has got drunk and decided to rapidly parade every unusual and eccentric character she could possibly imagine before the gathering, in order to impress her friends.

A host of unusual tales tumble out of this book, like so many magpie-gathered jewels that had been crammed into a box. Eva Luna hits us with one bizzare scenario after another, in rapid succession. Whilst an amazing and tumultuous tale is told, I found it a little frustrating... I wanted to know Eva Luna and the characters she encounters, a little more, explore their emoitional depths, understand their motives, perhaps even warm to them.

The book is suffused with lyrical flashes and memorable imagery and yet at other times I felt that monumentous events and important relationships are glossed over too rapidly.

This book is built of beautifully written snapshots of an adventurous and varied life. The setting is an unknown latin american country. Characters, nature, households and culture are vividly told. The main character is a rebel who survives and finds friends in unlikely ways. The story is never predictable. Surprisingly for a book from the eighties, a side character is transgender. I was never bored reading this book

"She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea."

I've read a few of Allende's novels and her memoir. I must say, I've settled on this one as my favorite just as one would settle on choice of wine: a few sips here and there, tightening of the tastebuds around one flavor and the instinctive feeling. Not too much logic involved, only how it makes a person feel.

This story spans decades, as one has always come to expect of the Allende novel. The storytelling is refined and told in the retrospective view, something Allende does masterfully. As usual, she gives justice to the inner psyche of her many characters, protagonists and antagonists alike. There are so many characters and yet so much intimacy as each character is deftly explored and familiarity established. Maybe this is what enticed me during the many days I stayed with this book.

Or maybe I was drawn to the dance of Eva Luna, she who name means life. It's possible that as Eva went from the young girl who battled many obstacles to the fearless young woman she became, I was drawn to her risky love choices and her modern political reality. There is a certain mystical realism that is utterly convincing but most importantly, I love how Eva uses her imaginative strength to triumph over a challenging reality.

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